Benchmark governance

Conflicts & the conflict wall

The wall between index operations and the trading circuit, plus standing disclosures.

W.E.T. operates two things that must not contaminate each other: an index layer that publishes benchmarks, and a trading circuit (WET Verified anchors, the War Room, tournaments) whose members trade the markets those benchmarks are computed from.

The wall between them is what lets both exist. Without it, every index value carries the suspicion that someone inside knew first.

The standing rules

  1. No early access to a rule or a composition change. Anchors, War Room members and paying subscribers see constituent changes, rule changes and methodology decisions at the same moment as the public. Nothing that alters how a benchmark is computed reaches anyone early, at any tier, for any price. This rule is absolute and has no exceptions below.

  2. No index role for circuit participants. Nobody who competes in the circuit takes part in constituent selection, classification review, or settlement.

  3. Published benchmark VALUES are simultaneous and public; paid service changes rights, not access. Every published close, settlement row, constituent list, and intraday indicative is available free and unauthenticated. There is no D+1 embargo, paid first look, or exclusive benchmark field. /api/pro/v1/indices/<slug> carries no exclusive benchmark data and consumer WET Premium does not grant commercial-use rights.

    A separate institutional licence may grant commercial or redistribution rights, support, an availability or latency guarantee, bulk-service capacity, or settlement-reference status. A latency guarantee is a service commitment about delivery of the same public publication; it is not permission to see a value before the public.

    /indices/week/preview is a distinct member analysis surface for a selected tactical slate candidate before its public Monday release. It is not an early benchmark value, benchmark constituent change, methodology decision, or settlement. No path serves a benchmark methodology or composition change early, and the public intraday indicative is explicitly never a settlement: it carries its own status and refuses rather than publishing an unsupported value.

    Correction, 2026-08-04 (historical; superseded as to benchmark-data access by the 2026-08-20 correction below). Until this date rules 1 and 3 stated that there was no preview tier, no embargoed feed, and no authenticated endpoint returning pre-settlement benchmark state. Both statements were false once the Pro API and the insider preview shipped, and the page was not updated with them. This entry records the correction made on that date; it is not the current standing rule. No value was withheld or disclosed differently as a result of the error; the defect was in the disclosure, not in the settlement.

    Correction, 2026-08-20 — and it runs the other way. The pre-correction text of rule 3 claimed the Pro API carries "the intraday indicative, which the free tier does not carry at all", and that the free tier "waits until D+1" for the close. Both were false, and both overstated what the paid tier gets. /api/indices/benchmarks/<slug>/indicative serves the indicative to anyone, unauthenticated, with no gate of any kind; /api/indices/benchmarks/<slug> returns the entire ledger — today's close included — with no delay rule applied, no authentication and access-control-allow-origin: *.

    The August 4th correction fixed a disclosure that understated what paid access included. This one fixes a disclosure that overstated it, which is the less obvious failure and the more expensive one: it tells a prospective licensee they are buying something they already have. /api/pro/v1/indices/<slug> carries no exclusive benchmark data today.

    As in August, the defect is in the disclosure and not in the settlement, and no value was served differently because of it. The correction is made by changing the DOCUMENT to match the SYSTEM — see the standing commitment at rule 6, which is the decision this correction forced into the open.

  4. No venue equity, no order flow, no exclusive routing. W.E.T. never operates order flow, never takes exchange equity, and indexes every eligible CFTC-regulated venue equally. Affiliate relationships with venues are disclosed on the pages that carry them and have no input into eligibility, weighting, or classification.

  5. The administrator does not trade the constituents. Personal positions in markets that are current or candidate constituents of a benchmark are not held.

  6. The public value is a standing commitment, not an accident of routing. (Added 2026-08-20, as oracle build item O0.6b.)

    Every benchmark value — every settlement row, every constituent list, and the intraday indicative — is served unauthenticated and free, and W.E.T. commits to keeping it that way.

    This is now a promise rather than an implementation detail, and the difference matters. Until this rule existed, public availability depended on a handful of routes happening not to check for a key. Nothing recorded that as a decision. A caching change, a middleware addition or a well-meant refactor could have converted W.E.T. into a selective-disclosure product without anyone deciding to — and selective disclosure of a benchmark value to paying subscribers is the conflict this entire page exists to prevent, arriving as a one-line change nobody flagged.

    The notice period. Withdrawing free access to any benchmark value requires 90 days' published notice, and the notice must state what is being withdrawn and why. Ninety rather than thirty because cessation.md's thirty days is calibrated to a benchmark ending — where the alternative is finding another reference — while this is a benchmark continuing on terms someone relied on. A consumer who built against a free value needs longer to re-plan than one whose reference is disappearing entirely.

    What is NOT covered by this commitment, stated so the promise is not read wider than it is: redistribution rights, support, latency guarantees, settlement-reference status, and bulk or programmatic access at a volume that costs us money to serve. Those are the paid product. The number is not.

    What a licence buys is therefore never access to a value. If it ever appears to, this rule has been broken.

    What this rule covers, stated because the promise has been read wider than it is. (Scope note added 2026-09-02. It withdraws nothing and therefore starts no notice period — it records the boundary the rule has always had.)

    This rule, and this page, govern the benchmark class only — WETGRI, WETFED, WETX, WETFRAG, and any index admitted to that class — exactly as data-licence.md already scopes itself: "This covers the benchmark class only." The protected objects are the published value, the settlement row, the constituent list, the intraday indicative, and simultaneous disclosure of any composition or methodology change.

    It does not govern market data W.E.T. reads from a venue. Kalshi, Polymarket and Gemini publish their own prices; W.E.T. normalises, searches, screens and annotates them. An event search, a price screen, an order book, a news match, a normalised REST feed and the analysis built on top are W.E.T. products over third-party data, not benchmark values, and the conflict this page exists to prevent — someone inside knowing a level first — does not arise for them. They may be priced, tiered, metered or withheld at the administrator's discretion, and doing so engages no notice period under this rule.

    One boundary sits inside that distinction and is governed by rule 1, not this one. The confirmed cross-venue identity set (content/indices/graph/confirmed.json) is read before constituent grouping, so a confirmation determines composition. The identities themselves are therefore published free and simultaneously. Only the live quoting and the gap arithmetic computed over them are a priceable product.

Standing disclosures

  • The index committee is not yet constituted. §3.7 calls for the administrator plus at least one independent member. The independent seat is vacant, and until it is filled the administrator is the sole decision-maker on methodology changes. This is a real governance gap, it is disclosed here rather than papered over, and it is the reason the benchmark family is published as v1.0 with the consultation process running in the open.

    The test the appointment must satisfy is published in advance, in committee-independence.md (added 2026-08-20). It is written before a candidate exists on purpose: a standard authored with a particular person in mind is a standard written to fit them. That document also records which decisions the administrator may and may not take while the seat is empty.

  • Affiliate revenue. W.E.T. earns affiliate revenue when a reader clicks through to a venue. Constituent selection is rules-based and published; no affiliate relationship affects it.

Reporting a suspected conflict

Use the process in complaints.md. Conflict reports are answered even when they are wrong, and the answer is published if the reporter is willing.

The rest of the set
Methodology change & consultation
What counts as a material change, the 14-day consultation window, and why changes are prospective.
Data licence & rights
What the free tier grants, what attribution it requires, and what commercial use needs.
The loop architecture
The nine scheduled agents that cultivate indices, which one may publish, and the six mechanisms that assure accuracy.
The confirm gate
What human confirmation covers — merges only — and how to read the provisional and single-venue counts.
Restatement policy
The three narrow conditions under which a published value may be corrected — and the many under which it may not.
Cessation & fallback
What happens when a benchmark cannot be computed, and why the history stays published forever.
Data-error playbook
Detection, triage, quarantine — and the commitment to disclose errors nobody noticed.
Complaints & challenges
How to challenge a value, a rule, or a constituent. No account required.
Settlement-reference licensing
What licensing a benchmark to settle against requires — and why publication alone does not grant it. Reading a value is free; referencing it in something that settles is not the same act.
Determination, disruption & cessation
Written for contracts rather than charts: who determines a final value, the disruption fallback ladder, and why a refusal is not a cessation.
The independent committee seat
The seven-part independence test, published before a candidate exists; the power to block rather than comment; and what the administrator may do while the seat is vacant.
Incident process
Who is paged, what they do, and what gets published when the machinery fails — as distinct from a wrong value, which is the data-error playbook.
Finding — the WETX coverage breach, August 2026
Why WETX refused for five consecutive days, the change that caused it, and what is still not established. Published because an availability figure without the incidents behind it is a number nobody can check.